An Experiment in Adsense Advertising

allen

3 years ago

If you’re not running an ad blocker, you may notice that there are small Google Adsense ads running on this site. After having blogged for 11 years without ads, I had wanted to see what the numbers for online advertising looked like. Specifically, I wanted to know the orders of magnitude in traffic needed for a blog to be self-sustaining.

Turns out paying for hosting will take a bit more than just throwing on a few banners.

Of course, the problem lies with the amount of traffic – or, the lack thereof – that this blog receives. I’ve never bothered trying to optimize for traffic1, and beyond a handful of posts to Hacker News, the viewing stats remain unsurprisingly modest:

Which means that the amount earned by Adsense is non-existent:

Since Google does not make any payments until the total accumulates to $100, at the current pace, I’ll see my first check in less than a thousand years. I’m giddy just thinking of participating in all the advertising.